1875
BESIDE NIAGARA
There can be no mistake about Charlotte Tucker’s enjoyment of fresh sights and scenes across the Atlantic, or about the fact that increasing years had at least not dimmed her appreciation of beauty. Most kind and warm hospitality was shown to her at Quebec, at Montreal, and at Toronto. She was met at Oakville Station by her younger nephew, Charles Tucker,—the latter in ‘a state of joyous expectation’ which had kept him awake through three previous nights. Then followed a welcome from his wife, in their ‘pretty little home,’ elsewhere described by her as ‘a Canadian settler’s little farmhouse.’
While there, finding the life quiet, and plenty of time on her hands, she ‘took to Persian characters,’ as ‘an interesting riddle to solve,’ and also worked hard at her Hindustani, spending many hours over both.
Also she insisted on doing in Canada as Canadians do,—making her own bed, and even essaying to accomplish some ironing. Perhaps the last attempt did not meet with brilliant success. She wrote home about it:—
‘“‘Though seldom sure if e’er before
That hand had ironed linen o’er ...”
the great matter is that the things are clean; but I own I am glad that I shall have a dhobi in India.’
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Another day she wrote to Mrs. Hamilton: ‘The little maid here amuses me. She is very fond of music, and likes me to sing for her. She asked me—kindly—if I would like my boots cleaned, and as I thought that I should, the little dear cleaned them, and brought them to me to show off her work,—as a six-year-old child of the house might have done. She looks such an innocent duck!’
An expedition to Niagara was achieved with much success; after which she wrote to one of her aunts in England: ‘My nephews think me amazingly strong, and yet I have become almost a teetotaller. Except your little bottle of sherry, I have only tasted wine twice since I left you. How I did enjoy your lemon-juice!’
Her glowing description of the Falls themselves, sent to Mrs. Hamilton, must be at least in part quoted. Though an oft-related tale, it may perhaps gain some freshness from her mode of telling it:—
‘Clifton House, Niagara Falls,
‘June 22, 1875.
‘I must write to some dear one while the sound of Niagara is in my ears, whilst the impression of Niagara is fresh in my mind; and I direct my letter to you, sweet Laura, knowing that you will let others see it....
‘I have looked on the most glorious scene, I believe, that is to be seen on this planet. How can I attempt to describe Niagara? When I gaze on what is called “The American Fall,” I ask myself a dozen times, “Is it possible that there can be anything more beautiful?” ... though I have only to turn my head a little to behold the “Horse-Shoe Fall,” which is even more gloriously beautiful. The American Fall would make in itself twenty or thirty cascades that would delight us in England. O the sparkling rush of diamonds,—the white misty foam breaking on the picturesque rocks beneath,—the accessories so beautiful,—the cloud-like veil so transparently lovely!
‘Earth here is so fair, with bold crags draperied with the richest foliage, that one could imagine her contending for the palm with[186] water; but water carries the victory at Niagara; Earth but serves to frame and set off her magnificence. If Earth be green, so is water. Where Niagara plunges over her Horse-Shoe-shaped rocks, the colour of the water is often brilliant, crystal-like green. Then as the river emerges from its veil of spray,—spray sometimes rising pyramid-like for hundreds of feet,—it assumes a deeper green, more blue than that of the surrounding foliage, but pure in tint.
‘A lovely, most verdant island, Goat Island, divides the two grand Falls,—or, I may rather say, three, for one glorious cascade is called Central Fall. In this exquisite island, and other smaller ones, you wander amongst silent shady woods, or stand so close to the rushing waters, that one or two steps would send you over the brink into the cloudy chasm below. Perhaps, Laura, nothing can better convey to you the impression left on me, than to tell you what was my repeatedly recurring thought. “If I had to suffer martyrdom, in no form could it appear more attractive than by being thrown over Niagara!” To be launched into eternity, shrouded in that cascade of diamonds, would rouse such a thrilling sense of the beautiful and the sublime, that half one’s fears would be swallowed up in something almost like joy. It would seem ten times more horrible to be flung from a high tower on to the hard, cold earth. This is not a mere fancy of my own. I find that I am not alone in thinking that death would appear less repulsive at Niagara than elsewhere.[23]
‘I have seen the many beauties of this place well.... I have looked on the rapids above the Falls. They seemed to me an emblem of human life. Such a rushing,—such a hurry,—chafing against obstacles,—impatience, passion, excitement. Then comes the grand leap—boldly, almost joyously, taken,—the leap into cloud and mystery,—and below, the river emerges from froth and foam, comparatively calm. One wonders that it is as quiet as it appears to be after such a plunge!
‘Yes, I shall never see such a sight again, till I behold the Great White Throne, and the Sea of Glass, like unto crystal.
‘We all wandered about yesterday, till we were too much tired to wander more. We had intended to sit up to see moonlight on Niagara; but instead of so doing we separated at 9. I soon fell asleep, but I woke in the dim twilight, I suppose at about 3 A.M. The[187] opportunity was not to be lost. I washed and dressed, as much by feeling as by sight, opened my venetian shutters, and walked out into the verandah which commands a fine view of both Falls.
‘I was in utter solitude, under the light of the moon. Not in silence, for the sound of many waters is unceasing. I suppose that for thousands of years Niagara has been praising her Creator, as she does now. The sound is not at all noisy; on the contrary, it does not disturb conversation, which surprises me.
‘I sang snatches of the Hallelujah Chorus, as I looked on the waterfall by moonlight. There was no distinct play of moonbeams on the water; there was an immense amount of mist,—one felt as if looking down on clouds. Presently the clouds in the sky flushed rosy in the dawn; the moon grew pale; Niagara with her emerald green more distinct. I waited till I had seen the sunrise—it was not a very bright one—and then I retired to my room, and went to sleep again.... Solitude is congenial at Niagara.... I do not care to write on trifling themes now....
‘A thought came to my mind as I was resting just now. As photographs, however faithful, convey but a very inadequate idea of the real Niagara, so must our highest conceptions of Heaven fall short of Heaven itself. Who that has merely seen a photograph, or many photographs, of the Falls, can drink in the beauty of the living, bounding, changing, glorious miracle of Nature, which is beheld here? Yet Niagara itself is but a bubble, compared with “the glory which shall be revealed.”’
Towards the end of July she returned home, to spend a few last weeks with her dear ones before bidding them a long farewell and going forth to her Indian campaign. Through all these weeks she does not seem to have relaxed in her persevering study of Hindustani, or in her struggle with the difficult gutturals which had to be mastered. Apart from this she must have had enough to occupy her time. Among lesser employments, she is said to have spent hours at a time in looking through her papers and letters—the collection of a literary lifetime—and consigning masses of the same to destruction. One cannot but wish that the destruction had been less wholesale.
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The Dismissal Meeting of Missionaries was on the 11th of October; and two or three days later the Strathclyde sailed.
To most of her relatives the parting was a good deal softened by the conviction that Charlotte Tucker would surely soon find herself compelled to give in, and to return to England. One of her nieces can say: ‘We all thought, when she left us for India, that she would fail in health, and be obliged to come home again. And so I could stand at the doorway, and watch her as she turned round in our carriage to wave her last good-bye, without any misgiving that it was indeed the last time that I should see that bright smile.’
But her sister, Mrs. Hamilton, the loved Laura of early days, had a truer prescience of how things would be. Speaking afterwards to a friend about that day of parting, and about the intense, loving devotion which had always existed between them, she said: ‘When my sister and I parted from one another, it was a parting for ever on Earth. My sister will not return to England on furlough, as other Missionaries do, for the reason that she could not again go through the pain of separation.’
At the time little was said in letters about that heart-rending pain. It had to be endured, and it was endured courageously.
So ended the fifty-four years of Charlotte Maria Tucker’s English Life. She turned herself now, with a smile of good cheer, to the eighteen years of her Indian Life—the Evening of her days. Three-quarters of her tale is told, counting by years. Only one-quarter remains to be told.
Fifty-four years of preparation; and then the Evening of hard toil. Fifty-four years given to slow perfecting of the instrument; and then eighteen years of use for that instrument. This was what it came to. Not that her[189] English life had been without its uses and its fruits; but the long, quiet home-existence had doubtless been mainly a making ready—or rather, a being made ready—for that which was to come after. The first was subordinate to the second.
Was it very long preparation for comparatively short work? But the worth of work done does not depend upon the length of time occupied in the doing. We may better understand this if we think of our Blessed Lord’s Life,—the Thirty Years of silent preparation and waiting; and then the Three Years’ Ministry. Each moment of His Life upon Earth bore fruit; but none the less, those Thirty Years were mainly of preparation for what should follow.
There are some who would not agree with Charlotte Tucker in considering ‘Missionary work of all work the highest’; yet in one sense, if not in all senses, it certainly is so. The soldier who goes on a forlorn-hope expedition ranks higher in the minds of men than the soldier who remains in camp; and the pioneer is counted worthy of more honour than the settler.
We hear in these days many a careless sneer levelled at attempts to convert the Heathen, at the uselessness and fruitlessness of such efforts. Nothing is easier than for a man, sitting at home in his luxurious arm-chair, to flout those who go forth into heathen lands. And there is a certain trick of seeming common-sense in the arguments used, which sounds convincing. So much money spent, and so many lives sacrificed,—and for what? Half-a-dozen converts, perhaps, in a dozen years, some of whom prove in the end to be faithless, while others are very far from being faultless saints. Is the result worth the outlay?
As for the characters of some of the converts, we only have to look at home, and to see for ourselves what the average civilised and well-taught and highly-trained[190] Englishman is—how very far in a large majority of cases from being either blameless, or saintly, or entirely faithful to his Baptismal vows. After that glance, one may feel less surprised to hear of failures among young and untrained converts, the whole pull of whose previous lives has been utterly adverse to Christianity; not to speak of the baneful effects of a surrounding heathen atmosphere, always present after conversion.
But as to the main argument,—whether the result is worth the outlay,—I should be disposed to say at once frankly that, from a purely mercantile point of view, it certainly is not. Very often indeed the immediate results, seen to follow upon Missionary work, are not at all commensurate with the amount of money spent. Many a Missionary has given his time, his income, his life, his all, for the sake of no apparent results in his own lifetime. There have been grand men, who have toiled steadily on through ten years, twenty years, thirty years; and at the close, if they have had any converts at all to show for their labours, those converts could be counted on their fingers.
It may well be that one man brought out of the darkness of heathendom is a prize worth fifty times—or five thousand times—the money expended in bringing him. But this would not be seen from the mercantile point of view. Neither does it touch the true gist of the question.
A little story told of the great Duke of Wellington, so ardently admired by Charlotte Tucker, shall supply us with a clue here. Whether or no the tale itself be genuine hardly affects its value as bearing on the subject. A young clergyman is stated to have one day, in the presence of the Duke, spoken about foreign Missions in the disparaging terms often affected by a particular class of young men. One can exactly picture how he did it,—the supercilious contempt of one who knew little about[191] the matter; and the careless looking down upon all who did not agree with himself. But the Iron Duke is said to have responded sternly:—
‘Sir, you forget your marching orders,—“Go ye into all the world, and preach the Gospel to every creature!”’
If the Duke did not speak the words, they sound very like what he would have spoken. It is a soldier’s view of the matter, and it is the view which all true ‘soldiers and servants of Christ’ ought to take. For this is no question of mercantile views, of business arrangements, of what will or will not repay, of so many converts more or less, of success and failure. This is not in any wise a question of results. It is purely and simply a question of Obedience. The Church generally is commanded to preach the Gospel throughout the world; whether men will hear, or whether they will not. Individuals are bound to go, if called,—and if not themselves called, they are bound to send others.
All of us who are Baptized in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, are bound to His Service who is our Royal Master; and His orders we have unquestioningly to obey. Whether or no we can see the wisdom, the necessity, of what He commands to be done, makes no difference. We are but privates in His Army; and a private has no business with an opinion of his own as to where he shall go or what he shall do in the time of war.
When the ‘noble six hundred’ of Balaclava were ordered to charge the Russian guns, they knew the uselessness of the act, the certainty of a blunder; but with that they had no concern.
‘Their’s not to make reply,
Their’s not to reason why,
Their’s but to do and die!’
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And though with our Royal Master we have no fear of mistakes, the same spirit of absolute obedience must be ours, whether or no we fully see the reasons for each command. What would be thought of an English soldier who, on being ordered to some lonely and difficult post, were, instead of going at once, to begin to calculate whether it were worth while,—whether the cost and trouble of his going would be sufficiently repaid by results? Yet such is the spirit in which certain soldiers of the Cross—somewhat faithless soldiers, surely!—are disposed to regard this great Marching Order of our Captain and King.
Another way of looking upon the question is embodied in certain popular ideas that, on the whole, the Heathen may be hardly worse off as Heathen than they would be as Christians. The less knowledge, the less responsibility, we are told; and a good deal of cant is talked on this subject. Those who have seen how things verily are in heathen lands, those who have witnessed the awful and desperate cruelties which there prevail, know what the argument is worth as to the present life. While as to the future,—let it be fully granted that ignorance means few stripes, that every excuse will be made for those who did not and could not know better, that increase of knowledge must of necessity mean increase of responsibility. But there again we come back to our ‘marching orders.’ If Christ died for the heathen, if God wills that they shall know the Truth and shall at least have it in their power to rise thereby to higher levels, what are we to dare to decide that they shall be left in darkness?
The whole question of our duty as Christians, on this point as on all others, hinges here,—Are we doing, or are we not doing, that which God wills us to do? All theories respecting outlays, values, results, sink into utter insignificance beside this question. If we are called to go, it is not for the sake of honour, it is not for the sake[193] even of success, but it is simply for the doing of the Will of God. If we are bidden to remain at home, it is still for the doing of His Will,—and that Will includes the spreading of the Church of Christ throughout the world. Those who stay at home can at least help those who go on this mission.
In the matter of results very unreasonable expectations are often formed. The best results do not commonly appear at once, and may not appear for a lifetime. A farmer ploughs his land, then sows his seed, and then waits months for the harvest. The Church too frequently scratches the hard ground with an impatient hand, drops in a few seeds, and immediately breaks into lamentations, because no instantaneous harvest springs forth.
It may take twenty years merely to plough the hard ground in some heathen spot, and to sow the seed; and years more may pass before the first tokens of a harvest are seen. Sometimes the fuller results are the longer delayed. Mustard-seeds spring up a good deal faster than acorns.
The main work of Charlotte Tucker’s eighteen years was to be that of ploughing. And whether few or many converts rewarded her toil is an entirely secondary consideration. They would have been very gratifying to her own feelings, no doubt; and that said, all is said. Results there were; but not all kinds of results can be reckoned upon one’s fingers. Charlotte Tucker went out in obedience to what she felt to be the Divine call, the Divine command. So long as she was steadily endeavouring to do the Will of God, results might very well be left in His Hand. The Word of God does not return to Him void; but naturally its working is not always apparent to us.
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PART II
LIFE IN INDIA
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‘O Spirit of the Lord, prepare
All the round Earth her God to meet;
Breathe Thou abroad like morning air,
Till hearts of stone begin to beat.
‘Baptize the Nations; far and nigh
The triumphs of the Cross record;
The Name of Jesus glorify
Till every kindred call Him Lord.’